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Ignorance Is Bliss

By Joy ⋅ February 20, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

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Here’s a very interesting article I found yesterday:

In what they term the Blissful Ignorance Effect, researchers at the university’s Tippie College of Business found that people who have only a little information about a product are happier with that product than people who have more information.

“We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there’s a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they’ve bought,” said assistant professor of marketing Dhananjay Nayakankuppam. “The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. But the more information you have, the harder it is to kid yourself. This can be contrasted with what happens before taking any action when people are trying to be accurate and would prefer getting more information to less.”

[...]

Nayakankuppam said prior research has shown that before people make a buying decision, they generally like to take an objective, clear-headed view of the products they’re considering. During this phase, so-called accuracy goals play a larger part of a person’s thinking because they want to buy the product that best meets their needs at a reasonable cost. His research, however, shows that once a decision has been made, the Blissful Ignorance Effect takes hold and the buyer makes that emotional commitment to a decision.

He said the data suggests a shift in peoples’ motivations. While they have a need to be accurate before taking some action, post-action it is the directional need to justify a conclusion that is more important, he said.

“Once we’ve committed to something, we want to be happy about the decision and that drives our perceptions about it,” said Nayakankuppam. “It’s your decision, it’s a part of you, and that creates an emotional attachment. It’s sort of like your kid and you want to like it no matter what.”

In that way, he said the less we know about something, the easier it is to create our own conceptions about it. For instance, he said that if we don’t know the chocolate we’re eating has hundreds of calories, we can convince ourselves that it isn’t expanding our waistline.

[Source: Newswise]

Ignorance is indeed bliss and we’d rather not regret the choices we made by knowing less. I wonder how true this holds for (romantic) relationships. I mean, think about it. Sometimes we fall in love madly, blindly sometimes even to the point where we only know a person’s name and nothing else matters! Funny humans! It’s only when we find out all the other things about the person and realize it’s not as pretty a picture as we imagined her/him to be that really tests our commitment to this choice…to the person we hold dear.